


Solitude

by Winterflower



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:33:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterflower/pseuds/Winterflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I am not going to come anymore,” he said and gathered his belongings. Someone else would have to find out the truth about Abigail Hobbs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solitude

The whiteness of hospital walls was like an inaudible scream. He walked by with minimum eye contact with the walls. And with the people walking by. The damn corridor was endless.

“Now, I don’t want you to get alarmed, Mr. Graham,” the nurse said. He focused his eyes on her teal uniform, the colour of seasickness. That was nurse code for something happened. “But there was an incident this morning.” Of course there was. They would not have called Alana otherwise.

\----  
He turned the lights off. In the darkness, the classroom felt safer. He could sink into the space, become part of the background, blend into the wall. The projector coughed. Dust particles swirled in its cold, technical light. A picture of a man in a suit was projected into the retina of his students.

“Joseph Lennox, lawyer and family man, killed three…” He fell into the monotony of prepared lecture notes. A drop of sweat trickled down the bridge of his nose. His glasses slipped. He pushed them back and forced the room into focus. He had been a front row spectator in Lennox’s mind. The cold calculating cogs that took pleasure in the meticulous execution of the murders, crimes that aspired to perfection. He had inhaled the excitement of sadism, felt his lust for fear and pleading.  
The impatient shuffling of papers coming from the auditorium told him that class time was ending. He turned the projector off and shuffled papers while the academy students filed out. No need to see the curiosity, the admiration with which they adorned him. He could not see himself as the damaged hero they thought he was. Sometimes he could not see himself at all.

Crawford had left a message for him on his phone, a curt “my office, after lecture.” He placed his lecture notes in the folder and left the classroom.  
He hesitated before entering. Alana Bloom’s voice entered his consciousness.

“I have to go. Abigail Hobbs is my patient.”

Crawford did not relent.

“I need you at the meeting. To back me on this. You know how the suits on the advisory committee feel about Graham’s involvement in field work.”

An unfortunate moment for him to enter. Just as they were talking about him. Crawford caught his figure from the corner of his eye.

“Will, come in.”

Alana smiled at him, very slightly, uncomfortably. She was ashamed he had heard. He looked away. Anywhere but at her face. In his mind, Alana Bloom occupied a special fortress that he rarely visited. The items there were contraband, dangerous and desirable, and he could not catalogue them by any rational means. He had let them gather dust for many years. No reason to change it now. He merely nodded in Alana’s direction.

“The hospital called. There has been an incident with Abigail Hobbs. The doctors think she is suicidal.”

“And you think this proves she had something to do with Hobbs’ murders?”

Alana stepped away from the window to face Crawford.

“We can’t rule out the possibility. That’s why I need Will to go there. Have a conversation with her.”  
Alana’s face betrayed nothing, but beneath the still water, the currents raged. She looked at Will for a moment, failed to meet his eye (he was still staring at the wall). She didn’t want him there. In the room with the girl whose father he had killed. Dangerous thoughts, like sparks on dry kindling, fostering a bond of dependency like that.  
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You should call Dr. Lecter. ”  
Will nodded in agreement. Jack sighed and picked up the phone on the desk.  
“Sarah, please connect me with Dr. Lecter.”  
\------  
The blood drained slowly. He needed to collect it, savor every precious drop. The phone rang. “Jack Crawford”, according to the caller ID. He sighed, wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, and answered the phone.

\-----  
“Dr. Lecter is at a conference in Annapolis. He will not be back until Thursday,” Crawford announced. The receiver fell down with a clang.  
Will sat down on the chair. Alana was looking into the hallway. Avoidance, the word punched a hole into his chest.  
“I’ll go,” he said. “I know, I know,” he said catching Alana’s expression. Professional distance and all that. Alana gathered her suitcase and walked out of the room.

 

\---------------  
He’d had to wipe his palms on his jeans every two miles on the highway from Quantico to Baltimore. The steering wheel was damp and slippery. Abigail Hobbs was a fortress with too many windows. He feared looking at her, yet at the same time he refused to board over the windows. He’d held her neck between his fingers, her blood pooling on the immaculate floor. In a moment, he had been fulfilled, Hobbs’ desire realized in the dying woman on the floor.  
He pulled over. His vision was clouded with tears. Her death was what he had desired more than anything.

 

\--------------------

 

The nurse led him into an elevator and pushed the button. He saw a bite mark between her index finger and thumb. “Abigail smashed a mirror in her room. We thought she was using the shards to cut herself,” she remarked as the elevator stopped. He pushed his slipping glasses back up.  
She was facing the window when he entered the room. Her black hair was pulled back in a pony tail, a bandage around the wound. A bandage on her right fingers. He heard the mirror breaking, the anger mixing with the blood and the glass. Guilt didn’t speak in such loud tones.  
The window reflected her face. A kind, beautiful face. He saw the outside through her eyes. The valedictory glow of the sun and the mellow blush of dusk on the red sky. The canopy of barren trees. He couldn’t look into her eyes, but he could look into the eyes of her reflection, a version of Abigail Hobbs that he carried around like a piece of polished drift wood.

  
“Abigail.”

  
She turned to face him. He saw into the fortress now, touched the hidden objects. Jack wanted him to see guilt in her eyes, thirst for blood. But he couldn’t make himself look. So he stared at the bandage around her neck. His design.  
Ticks of the clock. How two things could so close and so far apart. Minutes, he didn’t count them.

  
“You think about killing people all the time,” she finally said.

The voice was hoarse, parched. There was some damage to the trachea. He had felt it under his hands. She took his silence as an invitation to continue.

  
“Do you ever think about killing yourself?”

  
Her guilt. He was focused on her guilt.  
“Yes.”

 

The affirmative weighed like a stone tied to his neck. He couldn’t lie. In the depths of the nightmare, when terrors gripped him, when the victims screamed their voiceless pain, he had thought about it. Cradled it, a little bud of an idea. When he saw their faces, when he saw his own hands take their life, and when that burden crushed his chest, he thought about the plunge. But he never acted.

  
Words of comfort escaped him at this moment. So instead he took her hand. The bandaged hand. He wanted to be on the clinical side, the side that administered medications, wrote data in charts and passed diagnoses. The side that did not meddle with the intimacy of the mind.

  
“I smashed the mirror. There was a monster-“ Her voice trembled and broke. His thoughts trailed to a bird his father had shot midflight when they were children. Abigail Hobbs was retreating, and he couldn’t save her anymore. He felt love surge within him. He had wanted to save that bird. In the space of his mind, the space he shared with Garrett Jacob Hobbs, he had let death and love melt together.

  
“I am monster. He killed them because of me.”

  
Will shook his head. He was still holding her bandaged hand.

  
“You are not responsible.” Those words came from his Alana Bloom repository. Words she would utter. He wasn’t sure he believed that. But he said them anyway.  
He could accept her point of view, slip into the shell of her mind, listen to the rumble of the thoughts deep within. See whether it was guilt or fear that brought tears to her eyes. That is what Jack wanted, what Jack expected of him.

  
But he wasn’t sure.

  
The day she woke up he had promised to Alana Bloom to place a padlock on the door to Abigail Hobbs’s mind. He hadn’t kept any of his promises lately. In a disconnected moment, he placed his hand on her cheek. Her eyes found his, a deep violent blue, a troubled sea that he plunged into.

  
He pressed his lips to her mouth. True, the afterimage of Hobbs’ desire still burned in him, but this was not it. This was the fortress breaking. He had picked up the forbidden object.

  
A brief kiss, a desperation for something intangible. After they broke off, she looked out of the window.

“I am not going to come anymore,” he said and gathered his belongings. Someone else would have to find out the truth about Abigail Hobbs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. This is my first fic in the fandom!


End file.
